


A Guide to the Care and Maintenance of Your Manic-Depressive Android

by vanceypants



Category: Be More Chill - Iconis/Tracz
Genre: Bipolar Disorder, Delusions, Human Jeremy Heere's Squip, Implied Child Abuse, M/M, Mental Breakdown, Mental Health Issues, Psychosis, Self-Harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-21
Updated: 2020-04-21
Packaged: 2021-03-01 20:46:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,893
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23773297
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vanceypants/pseuds/vanceypants
Summary: They don’t believe you when you say you didn’t want to die. Scratching at the bandages on your wrists, you try one last time for them to understand.  To hear you, to listen to you.  “I’m not suicidal,” You say.  “I didn’t try to kill myself. I just wanted someone to see."“To see what?” Their pens scribble pityingly in another page for your file.You never know how to answer that part.
Relationships: Jeremy Heere/Jeremy Heere's Squip
Comments: 2
Kudos: 47





	A Guide to the Care and Maintenance of Your Manic-Depressive Android

**Author's Note:**

> I'm finally back on my meds, which means I'm sitting around thinking about my own experiences. Which means I have to project onto the Squip. Alternate Universe as always. TW for self harm and delusional thought patterns, as well as brief implications of child abuse.

Most days, you’re not sure if you’re pretentious or deep. You just have so many words in your head at any given time, clanging, bouncing, stabbing into your processors that you have to get them out, incoherent and messy and brilliant and outlandish.

Most days, you think Jeremy is getting tired of you. Because you have so many words (clanging, bouncing, stabbing), and you don’t always vet them so well, and they just spill from your lips like blood from a stabbing victim. He has to mop them all up, and you’ve learned to be less venomous, but he still gives you that Look sometimes.

You hate that Look.

And you hate the inevitable question it brings.

_Did you take your meds?_

And no matter how much you try to sever the psychic link between you two, your thoughts are so loud, so so loud, and you know he hears your “no!” screaming and bleeding and leaking from you, helium from an overstuffed balloon, despite the “yes” you pray out loud.

You used to hear his thoughts instead. Then they’d upped your dosage and you’d lost the ability, and even when you flushed the bottle, replaced it with sugar pills to allow Jeremy the safe illusion he required, you hadn’t quite been able to get it back.

You miss being able to read minds. You miss being able to fly. You miss being fully synthetic, instead of this strange half-form.

But, you tell yourself as you scrape the blade through the flesh on your face to dig through to the metallic plating you know is underneath, once you rid yourself of this exterior, they’ll all see, they’ll all remember, and you won’t have to pass for this vulnerable husk anymore.

***

“Do you know why you’re here?”

The pitying tone of the psychiatrist’s voice makes you squirm more than the itch of a new medication regime. 

“Yes.”

“And why is that?”

You look at her like she’s the one who should be saying, “Because I’m crazy.”

Her face is soft. “You aren’t crazy. You suffer from delusions due to-”

You shut her out. It’s the same as they always say. Stupid. This is so stupid.

Your face itches from the stitches. Jeremy is going to sound so disappointed when you call him from the hallway phone for your ‘less than 10 minutes, other people need to dial out too’ phone call. Your toes curl in your non-slip socks. 

You feel like a fool.

You look like a fool.

And yet, these people don’t realize they’re the ones being foolish. Don’t they understand you could topple this whole building if you wanted to?

You’re crazy, but you’re not powerless. The meds can only suppress so much, surely.

By tomorrow, you’ll forget these abilities again. But for now, you cling.

***

“Your full name?”

“Squip.”

“No, I need your legal-”

“Super Quantum Unit-”

“It says here that your name is-”

The words come out of his mouth in scribbles, black and toxic and suffocating. You watch them coil and fill the room and you cover your ears with your hands until he stops talking.

***

You’ll be out faster if you go to group.

You’ll be out faster if you go to group.

You know the rules. You’ve been here before. You know the rules. Life is nothing but rules.

And you’ll be out faster if you go to group.

You curl up tighter in your bed and try to grasp at the last vestiges of your power before it’s stripped away.

***

She’s a paranoid schizophrenic and she rocks back and forth as she sits across from you. You’re nursing a black coffee and staring at the plate of scrambled eggs they’re insisting you need to eat since you didn’t place a breakfast order the night before.

They don’t seem to want to accept that you don’t need to eat.

She introduces herself by diagnosis first, and then name. You remember the former and not the latter.

“Bipolar 1 with psychosis.” You pause for a moment. “But my name is-”

The scribbles leave your mouth before you can stop yourself, rapid and hot and toxic, and your throat burns.

“...please call me Squip.”

You hate the meekness of the request. Your head is starting to hurt. You know they’ll let you have aspirin if you take your pills, but that requires admitting you need anything.

You don’t need.

You don’t need.

You don’t need.

“This shit’s a bitch, isn’t it?” She says.

You nod. This shit’s a bitch. You couldn’t say it more eloquently yourself, so you add her words to the forever growing word bank buzzing and swarming in your mind.

***

They don’t believe you when you say you didn’t want to die.

Scratching at the bandages on your wrists, you try one last time for them to understand. To hear you, to listen to you. “I’m not suicidal,” You say. “I didn’t try to kill myself,” You say.

“I just wanted someone to see,” You say.

“To see what?” Their pens scribble pityingly in another page for your file.

You never know how to answer that part.

***

Jeremy carries his own disordered thinking with the grace of a prince balancing books upon his head. You sometimes forget you met him in a fit of hypersexual trauma fucking.

You sometimes forget he used to believe you too. Your inhumanity. Your abilities.

You used to guide him. 

And now he’s the one guiding you to a seat in the rec room. You pick up a colored pencil idly, holding it like a cigarette, and tapping it restlessly.

“How are you feeling?”

“Shitty,” You say. He winces, and you soften. “The beds are awful for sleep mode.”

He smiles in that way he does when you say something that contradicts his belief in your humanity.

So you adjust. “Sleep. They’re awful for sleep.”

He takes your hand, stills the pencil. “I miss you.” He says.

You almost wish he’d say he was disappointed instead. His eyes shine, and you look away from them. You’re glad your own model wasn’t built with tear ducts.

“Are they treating you okay?”

You shrug.

So he tries to engage again. “Are you treating them okay?” His tone is teasing.

It makes you smile. “Trying. It’s hard, not everyone follows the rules.”

He doesn’t ask you what rules. You’ve already told him. Life is just a set of rules and regulations. If everyone would just follow your guidelines, it would be so much simpler. You like simplicity. Black and white. Order and laws and rules, rules, rules. Everything governed by rules.

Your mind starts clashing with them. You pick at the bandages at your wrists until he stills your hands again.

“You know I love you, right?”

As if the lack of knowledge would have been the route to this, this awful destination with these awful pajama pants and embarrassing socks. 

“Of course I do.”

And there’s nothing delusional about that.

***

Your power is slipping as they downgrade you, tablet by tablet.

***

They reprimand you for overspeaking in group. ‘Talking over people,’ those were the exact words. 

But they’d needed your guidance. Everyone needs your guidance. You’re worn thin from the intensity of synchronizing with the universe to try to bring the proper order.

You’re so tired.

***

“I think you’ve made a lot of progress.”

You hate the part of yourself that smiles, that feels lighter. As if you need anyone’s approval. As if you needed anything from here.

As if you need.

As if you need.

As if…

You need.

***

“And what about your parents?”

You fiddle with the stack of papers in your hands. Resources. You can’t remember who for, though, the question hanging before you. Trying to gauge the source of your--what? Your trauma? Your parental history?

Computers don’t have parents. They have motherboards, but no mothers.

“...they didn’t care for me very much,” You mumble. And wince at the sound of the scribbling that follows.

You tug at the bandages on your wrists. Your face itches.

You want to go home.

***

You call it a panic attack.

They call it a breakthrough.

You float after, your head fuzzy and empty. You try to remember what your words were, because this makes you boring, this makes you nothing; this, they say, makes you healthy.

Why are you so afraid of healthy?

***

“Why is it so hard to accept that you’re human?”

“Because I’m not.” You don’t remember why it’s so important to make them see. You can’t read their minds, and you’re fairly certain they can’t read yours.

There is no audience pressing over, there is no synchronization, there is no conspiracy and no upgrades available, there are no overwhelming world-destroying powers within your form.

But you’re not human. That much is true. You may be ordinary and small and insignificant. But you’re not human.

“Accepting your humanity would mean accepting your vulnerability, wouldn’t it?”

“I’ll take my fucking pills.” You clench your fingernails into your palms. You would bleed, but the wetness is something else. It’s something else. “I’ll take my fucking pills. You don’t have to keep bringing this up.” You’re not bleeding. You’re not bleeding. You’re not bleeding.

Even as they take your hands and bandage the minor cuts. You ignore the red. Red kills you, you want to tell them. Red kills you. You hate that color, you hate it inside you, and you hate it outside you.

Your childhood room used to be red.

***

Your mother used to call you a monster. She used to hurt you.

You can’t remember how. But she used to hurt you. There’s a logic to that, but you haven’t unraveled how. You deserved it, because you weren’t human, and that made it okay.

She hurt you.

You were her son. But you weren’t human.

But humans produce humans. Humans can only produce humans. 

And she cried as a woman would cry. As a human would cry. For the son she’d wished she’d had instead, someone who understood the world, someone who followed the rules.

Someone human.

***

You shrug when they ask you how you feel.

And they sign your discharge papers the next morning.

***

Jeremy drives so carefully, as if you’re precious cargo he’s afraid to shatter, as he takes you to the pharmacy. 

Your identification bracelet still hangs heavy on your left wrist. “I’ll cut that off once we get home,” He promises. 

You don’t particularly care. Your eyes remain downcast, as though everyone can look at you and see where you’ve been.

And you start to cry. You start to cry, in the checkout line at the pharmacy. He drops what he’s doing and holds you, as you cry, as you cry, as you cry. Like a human. As a human.

The world is fast and ordinary, and you are slow and ordinary. And Jeremy kisses your forehead even though you made yourself ugly. Scarred. Monstrous.

But human.

“I love you too,” You say, even though he hasn’t said it first this time. He caresses your face, and it feels nice to be touched. It feels nice, and your tears just fall faster.

He pays for your meds, and takes you to the car, and you try to promise you’ll be better. He knows you probably won’t. You know you probably won’t.

But to err is human.


End file.
